Who owns Inca treasures?

WASHINGTON — That day dawned unpromising, cold and drizzly, in the jungle foothills of Peru 95 years ago. The guides wanted to sleep in, but the explorer insisted on pressing deeper into the land of the Inca.

Which way are the ruins? demanded Hiram Bingham, a product of Yale in a battered gray fedora. The guide pointed straight up the mountain.

They climbed more than 2,000 feet along narrow paths, dodging poisonous snakes, inching across slippery logs spanning a raging river.

They rounded a promontory — and the stunned explorer beheld his future and humanity's past.

"It fairly took my breath away," he recalled later. "What could this place be?"

It was Machu Picchu, a lost city in the clouds, a terraced and cut-stone wonder that ranks somewhere with the Pyramids among examples of ancient technological prowess.

It is the pride of modern Peru, a major tourist attraction — and subject of a bitter dispute that erupted this month between Yale and Peru over who owns hundreds of artifacts Bingham collected during three expeditions. Many of those objects — bones, pottery, tools — reside at the Yale Peabody Museum.

Peru wants the objects back; Yale wants to keep them.

Alejandro Toledo, the first indigenous president of Peru, is scheduled to meet today with the Yale graduate who inhabits the White House as part of a visit promoting democracy and trade.

The Machu Picchu artifacts are not on the official agenda, but Toledo will likely raise the topic with President Bush, said Peruvian embassy sources, even though he considers the dispute a matter between his government and Yale, not between Peru and the United States. The White House agrees.

Two weeks ago, Yale proposed returning many of the artifacts but insisted on retaining a large number to ensure that "research and scholarship of these objects will continue." Peru insisted that Yale recognize Peruvian ownership of all the artifacts but suggested that some could remain on loan at the Peabody.

Peruvian Ambassador Eduardo Ferrero charged last week that Yale has "not acted in accordance with the principles of good faith," and he threatened a lawsuit. The university, meanwhile, asserted that Peru had "broken off negotiations ... instead of working out the framework for a stable and long-term resolution."

The biggest blow to Yale's case came last week when the National Geographic Society — which co-sponsored with Yale two of Bingham's expeditions and whose chairman, Gilbert M. Grosvenor, is a Yale graduate — concluded the artifacts belong to Peru and called for their return.

Even though this case comes amid a rising tide of seemingly similar disputes and settlements — the Metropolitan Museum of Art last month agreed to return looted works to Italy in exchange for loaned art, while the British Museum holds on to the Elgin Marbles — its documentary record makes it unique.

Ferrero calls Bingham a " 'rediscoverer,' not 'discoverer' because Machu Picchu was already known by people" in the area, he says. Dating to the 15th century and abandoned sometime in the 16th, the city was an elaborate vacation retreat for Incan nobility. Its discovery enhanced modern understanding of a sophisticated civilization that existed long before Spanish invaders overran the territory.

Seated in his office on Embassy Row, the ambassador leafs through pages of records — photocopies of Peruvian decrees passed in 1912 and 1914 to regulate Bingham's expeditions, letters on Yale stationery from Bingham to Gilbert H. Grosvenor, then-president of National Geographic.

He reads aloud from a Bingham letter dated Nov. 28, 1916: "Now they" — the artifacts from the third expedition — "do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government, who allowed us to take them out of the country on condition that they be returned in eighteen months."

Yale contends that under an 1852 law it is not obligated to return material collected on the first two expeditions. But Peru cites a 1912 decree in which it "reserves its right to request" return of any artifacts Bingham might find, or had found.